The Avro Car, What the hell were they thinking?

Did they really think that this was going to fly?

Ah the Avro Car!  Phil Klass and Donald Menzel probably looked at this and thought "Eureka! The answer to all of the sightings that we can't explain!"  That explanation is about as good as the CIA recently claiming that a high percentage of UFO sightings were actually of secret U2 tests.

The U2, the main reason people were seeing 

discs, triangles, spheres and footballs in the air!

My main question is would this small time Canadian project to develop a stable, hovering platform, have been purchased lock stock and barrel, have millions of 1950's dollars pumped into it only to be mothballed?  This was a time where helicopters, specifically the Sikorsky designs, offered exceptional stability, speed and range.  Why pump money into an unstable and under powered device were it not for one reason, its shape.  My question is would the Air Force have shown any interest in a hovering square?  Did the fact that it was a disc become the main driver of it's inception into the US government fold?  Having a project that is undeniably a "flying" disc would be a great way to establish plausible deniability when there are so many reports of these things flying around.  I will say that the money was not wasted in documenting the program.  There are a ton of videos on the National Archives YouTube site documenting it's progress.  It was kind of funny watching this lumbering thing barely go down a tarmac while the narrator is exclaiming the performance of this pitiful disc. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=opD86VZSWpo 

Influences

Like anyone who has more than a passing interest in the paranormal and UFOlogy in general, I have been positively influenced by some researchers and disgusted by others.  When I look at my interest in this field, 3 people come to mind that have either echoed my own thoughts or, more importantly, lead me to thinking in a new way about this mysterious topic.  As you can see, all 3 of these people, while different in their approaches, have the commonality of thinking that the UFO mystery is way more than grey, bug eyed scientists from Zeta Reticuli

Jacques Vallee

This is probably an obvious choice and Jacques has probably influenced more people in this field than anyone else in our short history of UFOlogy.  What I primarily admire about Jacques is his non-UFO background.  This is not someone who randomly had a UFO experience and decided to look further in the field.  This is a truly intelligent man who received a Ph.D. in computer science from Northwestern, has worked fro NASA in developing the first detailed map of Mars, developed some of the key tools that are allowing me to use the internet right now and is a successful multi-millionaire due to his venture capitalism.  I have read only one book of his, Revelations, but have listened to countless interviews that he has done.  What I really liked about Revelations is how it describes the government's peculiar interest in the topic.  Instead of thinking about the government as a monolithic entity that may be hiding the secret behind extraterrestrial contact in order to subjugate it's own people, Dr. Vallee describes whacky contactee's in positions of great power in the armed forces.  He also had a very interesting contact with UFOlogy's favorite whistle blower, Robert Lazar where Lazar confided to him that he doesn't completely remember his experience working at Area 51 because quote, "They were taking a lot of blood from me at the time."  Also curious, and someone without a science or tech background would not have found this salient, Lazar claimed that he was hired to back engineer these completely hi tech, interstellar, extraterrestrial craft and was provided with nothing more than a bench-top volt meter in order to complete this task.  It sounds like the trillions of dollars that are supposedly funding the black budget were not being funneled into scientific equipment!  This really paints a picture of a government that is hiding something from the public, namely that it knows as much or even less about UFOs than civilian researchers, and is trying desperately to convince top minds in the field that it does have access to this technology.  If you think about, almost all of these so called whistle blowers have something in their background that points to a history of deception, as if even if they were telling the truth, their is enough plausible deniability to ensure that they would never be taken seriously. 

I also admire Vallee's sense of history when talking about the subject.  It seems that a lot of demonic or angelic "visitations" in the past have a striking similarity to modern UFO encounters.  It seems that whatever the phenomenon is, it is being surreptitiously taken seriously by powerful people in society, has been with us since the dawn of civilization and is very keen to cover up it's true motives and sources.  It almost seems like a cosmic counter intelligence operation and it takes a mind like Vallee's to not only notice this fact but also scratch the surface on what it really is.

Greg Bishop

Greg Bishop, in my opinion, has the most original outlook on UFOlogy that I know of.  His take and his research interests are varied.  He can dive right in to nuts and bolts accounts of Air Force Office of Special Investigation (AFOSI) programs of deception backed by mountains of documentary evidence one day and then speculate that contactees may be part of some cosmic art project the next.  The biggest impact that Greg had on me is his thought that the way UFOs influence our culture is just as or in some cases even more interesting than UFOs themselves.  His excellent book, Project Beta, details AFOSI's attempt to draw away the highly intelligent, though also highly eccentric, electrical engineer and successful entrepreneur Paul Benewitz's investigation of "alien activity" at Albuquerque's Kirtland's Air Force Base.  What I loved about the book is how it delved into the government covert world.  One would think that Vienna or Prague would be the place to be in the late 70's/early 80's espionage world, but Bishop illustrates that the relatively small city of ABQ was, if not a front line, than at least a hotbed of interaction between government alphabet soup agencies and Soviet counter intelligence who both interfaced through the weird world of civilian UFO research organizations.  I don't care where you lie on the "government isn't telling us all it knows about UFO's" spectrum, the AFOSI operation concerning Benewitz is damn interesting.  More importantly, it is the genesis story of the popularity of people like John Lear, Bill Cooper, (to a lesser extent) Bill English and Phil Schneider.  Even if you bought the stories of the aforementioned people, their connections to the intelligence world should make you raise more than a few eyebrows.  

My first exposure to Bishop was in the excellent documentary movie, Mirage Men.  The movie made me rethink highly conspiratorial UFO stories of underground firefights between ET's and special forces, bad sci fi stories of Dan Burisch and his almost word for word rip off of the goodbye scene between Elliot and ET in his account of how he alone saved an innocent ET from the evil clutches of MJ-12.  Yeah, these stories do make their tellers seem like real world movie heroes, so on one hand you can see why they are told, but on the other hand, they make the government seem almost omnipotent which is no bad deal for the government.  Hell, if they can make one report of a highly top secret drone seem like an ET sanctioned test of an interstellar craft, than the subterfuge is worth it.  I will end with a paraphrased quote from John Keel that I first heard from Greg, "Civilian UFO organizations aren't telling the government the truth about UFO's."

Michael Swords

Although Michael Swords might be the most mainstream of the 3 influences I have mentioned here, I think that he is the influence I identify with most.  He is a Ph.D. Biochemist and a devout Catholic.  I have a degree in Biochemistry and I am Catholic (I am a horrible Catholic so I will have to forward anyone's spiritual advice questions to the communion of Saints!).  He was a regular member of CUFOS and although I am disappointed in the success, or lack there of, that they were able to achieve with some of the brightest minds in UFOlogy, I admire their organizational structure that consisted of a lot of Ph.D. scientists.  He is also heavily featured in what I think is the best UFO documentary on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iDb1oyVKnP4&list=PLujDIk_ZJDxvMKb-x5IBu8IqXfeuH-szU
And although he stopped posting on it last year, his blog, The Big Study, http://thebiggeststudy.blogspot.com/?_sm_au_=iVVFLrQ6kvN4pJTH
is the main place to go to read up on the more obscure UFO cases, especially since Albert Rosales' Journal of Humanoid Studies site took down its yearly reports due to them now being published for purchase (no offense to Albert, I think he put a lot of time and effort into collecting those reports and deserves to profit off of them).
I think that if we had 50 Michael Swords, 50 Greg Bishops and 50 Jacques Vallees (especially Jacques, because he is a self made millionaire able to devote substantial resources to study the topic), we would have solved the UFO enigma long ago.
Think about who your favorite researchers are and consider reaching out to them because I assure you they love to hear the support amongst all of the ridicule they face in the mainstream.  I am still star struck by the time that Greg Bishop personally responded to me on Facebook Messenger.  Until then, I will keep looking for high strangeness in low places!

Introduction

UFOs.  Everyone has heard of them. Most people (at least in the US) believe that they exist,  Some people (like myself) have personally experienced aerial phenomenon that they cannot easily explain.  An even smaller number of people (unlike myself) have claimed personal contact with the occupants.  Finally, an even smaller number of people (hopefully one day myself) have dedicated enormous amounts of their time and money to research this and other Fortean subjects.
What really disturbs me and what will be one the main focuses of this blog is to figure out why world governments, but especially the US government, have devoted an even greater amount of time and money to try and manipulating this rather small community.
Before I get further into the intro, I would like to say that this blog's title is very similar to a certain podcast that I am rather fond of.  That, plus the fact that to me it seems that quality UFO cases seem to be dwindling, is why I chose the title.  If Seriah over at Where did the road go? has a problem with the title, I will change it.
So a little background.  My name is Will DeVito, I am 32 years old, I reside in the greatest city in America, that being Milwaukee, WI.  I have a BS in Biochemistry from (at the time) the 92nd ranked Chemistry program in the world, the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and for the last 5 years I have been either a bench chemist or an applications expert (basically testing products in the field) for a fortune 500 hygiene company.  Unfortunately, last October, I left that position for a better paying one at a different and much smaller company in Dayton, OH which promptly laid me off right before Christmas.  Fear not, the great thing about having an advanced science degree is that you are always in demand and I have an interview with the Milwaukee division of a large, international analytical lab.
Why am I interested in UFO's?  Well, like many people who get into the field, I have always had an interest from a young age,  In fact, my mother tells me that when I was about 5 years old, I used to run into my room screaming and crying when my parents would watch an episode of Unsolved Mysteries that featured UFO's.  For some reason I was, and frankly still am, deathly afraid of being abducted by aliens.  The thought of little large head, large eyed beings entering your most holy of holies, your room, and performing bizarre and painful medical tests on you scares me at a level beyond rational thought.  With that being said, I am very skeptical of most reports of abductions and attribute them to either fabrications or more commonly, sleep paralysis which I have personal experience with and will be devoting a post or two soon.  Fast forward to the summer of 2007 and I am living back at my parents house after failing out of UW Madison.  Feeling dejected, I started spending more and more time with the tenants of my parents house, the house being a two family side by side.  The tenant, Paul, is a podiatric surgeon and is probably more interested in the UFO subject than I was at the time.  We used to sit outside in his makeshift patio set smoking cigarettes, listening to Coast to Coast and discussing our views on UFOs.  One hot June night, he got the brilliant idea to use a high powered LED flashlight to flash up at the sky in random patterns.  Lo and behold, we started seeing brilliant flashes of light that would then dim to a bright white ball and travel slowly in either a northerly or southerly directions.  We would also see the converse where we would see a dim white ball moving north or south that would then explode in a flash of brilliant white light before disappearing.  This went on for a couple of weeks and we would actually keep a notebook to log how many of these we would see.  A normal night would be about 7-8 but we would have highs of up to 23 in one night!  This evolved into my neighbor, by himself, seeing a 6ft diameter, pastel green orb travelling at ~200ft in the air at a slow speed, I, by myself seeing what at first I thought was a plane (we lived right over the flight path of General Mitchell International Airport) and quickly realizing that it had no wings and was completely silent!  The most unusual thing we saw that summer was when I came home late one evening after bar close and was in the front of the house (normally our sightings were in the back patio).  I guess I made a little too much noise as I was trying to come in and woke my mom up and also had Paul and his wife outside.  After his wife and my mom reprimanded me for my auditory disorder, they left and it was just me and Paul smoking a cigarette, shooting the, well you know, when all of the sudden, probably at an altitude of 10 feet above the house, two dark brownish-red lobed spheres (think of the batman symbol but more compressed) flew directly over the house, over our heads traveling to the north.  We both saw them at the same time but Paul was the first to point up and shout "OH!".  As soon as he uttered that, the object on the right performed a zig zag maneuver as if it knew it was being viewed.  The case that left the biggest impression on me did not happen that summer but rather during the frigid month of February in 2008.  My mom was throwing her annual Luau party where everyone was wearing leis, grass skirts and funky colored shirts.  I got bored with the party around 10pm and went over to see what Paul was up to.  He was standing staring at the sky which was full of fast moving clouds with clear sky in between.  He quickly summonsed me to look up and what I saw I at first could not believe.  Up in the sky, it looked like a normal starry night except that all of the "stars" were moving south at a constant speed.  At first I suspected that the speeding clouds were imparting an artificial motion to the normal stars, but I quickly checked by keeping the top of the 10ft high privacy fence in the same spot and sure enough, it was these balls of light that were moving and plus one could clearly see normal, stationery stars.  We would see about 20 of these objects moving south at one time.  This lasted for about an hour and we estimated that there must have been hundreds of these moving objects.  It was truly an amazing experience.  After that event, the sightings became fewer and fewer until about 2 summers later where we would be lucky to see a single boring ball of light moving per month.
That summer and the experience the following winter was truly a life changing experience that had a profound effect on two people who both have advanced degrees and truly high education.
Ever since those events, I have been constantly looking at the sky both here in Milwaukee and wherever I travel (I went to Las Vegas last summer and took a road trip up to the Rachel/Area 51 area) but have never come close to seeing anything like I did in 2007/2008.  It has left me wondering, Where did the UFOs go?